Antipodean Childhoods

You’ll get no argument from me. Like Macy and Ian, I have found Hazzard’s sentences to be the most thrilling in any book the club has read since Lydia Davis’s “Collected Stories.” But I wanted to comment on another striking aspect of “The Transit of Venus”: Hazzard’s depiction of Caro and Grace’s Australian childhood. In Chapter 5, Hazzard writes:

And on Christmas Day they sweltered beside the Hornimans’ celluloid tree while a brushfire broke out over Clontarf. Grace got a threepenny-bit in the plum pudding, but the afternoon grew awful. The children were forbidden to swim because of the turkey, and Athol Horniman hit Caro with a cricket ball. A few days later, Dora told them, “It’s 1939.”

This passage set off all kinds of bells in my head. I went digging among my books and found what I was looking for: Clive James’s “Unreliable Memoirs.” James, who was born in 1939, opens his book with a recollection of a childhood Christmas dinner with his mother, his Aunt Dot, and his grandfather (James’s father died in the Second World War):

It was the usual Australian Christmas dinner, taking place in the middle of the day. Despite the temperature being 100°F. in the shade, there had been the full panoply of ragingly hot food topped off with a volcanic plum pudding smothered in scalding custard. My mother had naturally spiced the pudding with sixpences and threepenny bits, called zacs and trays, respectively. Grandpa had collected one of these in the esophagus. He gave a protracted, strangled gurgle which for a long time we all took to be the beginning of some anecdote. Then Aunt Dot bounded out of her chair and hit him in the back. By some miracle she did not snap his calcified spine. Coated with black crumbs and custard, the zac streaked out of his mouth like a dum-dum and ricocheted off a tureen.

The tone of James’s comic memoir could not be much further removed from Hazzard’s novel, but the experiences they relate are remarkably similar. James’s grandfather and his uncle bear some resemblance to the “specters” Caro and Grace dread seeing in town. And like the sisters in “The Transit of Venus,” James boards a ship to the northern hemisphere to seek his fortune.

I wondered if James had read the Hazzard or Hazzard had read the James, but looking at the copyright pages of the two books, I saw that they were both published in 1980: A very good year for Australian writing.

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